Nick Candy: Sweet taste of success

Fifteen years ago the Candy brothers borrowed £6,000 from their grandmother to
go into business. Today their empire is worth millions and includes One Hyde
Park. Nick Candy talks to Jasper Gerard about creating fantasy homes
for the rich and his advice to budding developers

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Streets ahead: property has outpaced shares and bonds

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Nick Candy, left, who created One Hyde Park with his brother Christian
Photo: PA; Bloomberg

Talk about eye candy. The scene could be the set for that notorious Robert Palmer music video in which an army of ludicrously lovely ladies fawn over a dark-suited gent. However, with the Maybach limo waiting outside to whisk Nick Candy to his jet or yacht, the song might need to be renamed Addicted to Lucre.

The boyish 38-year-old developer-cum-designer has been exciting gossip columnists with his model/actress/singer girlfriend, Holly Valance, but it is financial figures that preoccupy him today. With his brother Christian, 36, he has created the world's most expensive homes, costing £6,000 per square foot, at One Hyde Park, London.

There are eel-skin walls, televisions in the showers, and changing-rooms with cameras at every angle. But critics claim the brothers are as extravagant with hype as with their fittings. When we meet, Nick Candy is plotting his next coup as he texts on two mobiles.

“It’s gone ridiculous, mad,” he says, revealing plans to turn the Household Cavalry’s Knightsbridge barracks (one of the largest potential building sites in central London) into a bigger and better One Hyde Park. He also plans to launch a foundation that will make him an arts benefactor to rival Charles Saatchi.

The swish block at One Hyde Park (you require room service? The maid will ring Heston Blumenthal) could turn the brothers from mere multimillionaires to billionaires. They claim to have sold more than 60 per cent of the 86 flats (one for £130 million), insisting the developers (Project Grande) can already pay off the £1 billion borrowed to transform a sought-after but neglected nook of the capital. One-bedroom flats are priced at £6 million, though until the agreed sales are registered we will not know if these prices have been met.

Whatever the figures, the Candys are doing all right for a couple of City boys who started 15 years ago with a £122,000 one-bedroom flat in Earls Court. Now they create fantasy homes for their own kind, the super-rich.

“We are now part of that life,” says a deadpan Nick, creator of homes for Kylie Minogue, Gwyneth Paltrow, Boris Berezovsky [Russian oligarch] and the Mittals [Indian steel tycoons]. “We try to educate our young designers in the needs of such people.”

He is friends with princes Andrew and Albert, Bernie Ecclestone [Formula One boss] and Simon Cowell. I find him tanned in a tailored shirt and Berluti shoes, but am more struck by the piercing stare. This is not a man riddled with self-doubt.

The 50 punters supposedly lined up to view the remaining 30 flats have all been vetted. “We know most of the chief executives of the major banks, so we can ring and ask if they look after such and such a person,” Nick breezes. “We don’t need their bank balance, we need to know if they can play the game.”

The Candys’ game is newly learnt. It consists of everything from Monaco penthouses to jets with silk carpets, and a yacht called Candyscape II.

“Our grandmother lent us £6,000 to start 15 years ago,” admits Nick, son of an advertising executive in Surrey. But even then the brothers realised that profit lay in offering the best. “That first kitchen was from Magnet, but with granite work surfaces,” he smiles. “My advice to budding property developers: do it on the cheap and you’ll get a cheap price. Don’t avoid putting in skirting just because it’s hidden by a sofa.”

Even now their fascination with detail is obsessive. Parking spaces at One Hyde Park have to be six metres long to house the inevitable Maybachs. But having designed sundry palaces, Nick is not fazed by the needs of the rich. The wonderfully named Knight Frank estate agent Rupert des Forges, who is selling the apartments, reports buyers are coming from such unlikely quarters as Norway and Turkey.

“One client didn’t want to go out so had us build him a nightclub in his house,” Nick shrugs. “We’ve designed swimming pools that turn into ballrooms, and fitted security devices that fill a garage with gas if someone is stealing your car.”

The exuberant luxury of One Hyde Park is being showcased while the nation’s finances look threadbare. Was he ever worried no one would buy?

“Of course we had sleepless nights,” he replies. “Would the bank go under, would the builder be OK?” The brothers were careful not to be left in the lurch. “We had marble quarried from seven mines around the world. We couldn’t risk not being able to match marble, so we got it all out of the ground and stored it.”

There is, he argues, a history of landmark buildings being constructed during recession, such as the Rockefeller Center, started after Wall Street crashed: “And we managed over 700 million of sales in 15 months when One Hyde Park was still a hole in the ground.”

However, the Land Registry only has a record of completed sales to the Candys and their business partner, the Prime Minister of Qatar. Richard Williams, director of Project Grande (the developer of One Hyde Park) responds that the Land Registry takes several months to update its records and that “£900 million of sales have been achieved”.

If the Candys’ first fortune was built on a soaring property market, they were helped this time by a plummeting pound, rendering One Hyde Park almost cheap to the peripatetic rich. Nick is hugely proud, claiming he offers quality that foreign buyers couldn’t previously find in London.

“They would look in Eaton Square and couldn’t understand why they might not be allowed to put in marble, because of the noise. In Number One we have the best soundproofing in the world.”

Nick rattles off a list of wondrous features so long that I almost fall off my chair when he admits to a mistake. “Project Grande forgot to fit a crèche. Not having kids, we didn’t think.”

The greatest challenge was completing the flats simultaneously. Developers often use the proceeds of one flat to finish the next. “But,” explains Nick, “the super-rich don’t want to live in a building site.”

The brothers speak up to 20 times daily. Until recently they shared a Monaco penthouse and even had facing desks. Nick has now returned to London, where he can take Valance around town, while Christian remains tax-exiled.

Don’t they infuriate each other, working that close? “We do argue, be it over sofas or whether to have tie-backs or the size of beds, or how many dining chairs to have at a table. Christian is very strongly opinionated and our tastes are quite different. He likes things super-structured and is quite conservative. I’m a little more eclectic, eccentric.” Eccentric? I’ve never met anyone more focused.

“As kids we argued like anyone else but we are very, very close, and it’s fantastic I could do this with my brother,” he continues. Indeed, he suggests that if I want to quote Christian, he can speak on his behalf. Yet their bond seems to be business as much as blood: “We holiday together, but even if we are skiing or on the yacht or enjoying downtime we talk business.” There is much business to talk about with contracts in 20 countries.

Next job? The Household Cavalry could send for the Candys to turn their HQ into another palace of opulence. “I gave them the idea, so it’s a possibility,” Nick smiles again.

Is it all just eye candy? We’ll have to study those Land Registry forms over the coming months to see if the Candys really can succeed.

Developing the Candy way

Never do it on the cheap

Offer the best quality in that market

Don’t cheat – even if you might get away with it, do it properly

Think big – the Candys quickly went into partnership with a financier to develop a block

Be ruthless – if suppliers are late, don’t pay

Obsess about detail. Tie-backs v curtains? It matters – really

Do all that tedious research on the local market

Study domestic design innovations

Think security – the richer your customer, the more preoccupied they are by it